There are some question & suggest for Dynamo 0.9.1. Hope we can make Dynamo better together,Thanks! And Thanks MR.Beng-Lin Goh’s help and translate the document, thank you very much!!

1.Cannot open more than one DYN file in the same Dynamo session

As of today, a single Dynamo session allows only one Dynamo file at any given time. It is not uncommon that there is a need to duplicate existing set of nodes, but nodes cannot be copied from another instance of Dynamo. We have to recreate the set of nodes, or open a temporary custom node workspace to duplicate nodes. We hope it becomes possible to open multiple Dynamo files in the same session.

2.Nodes in the background cannot be brought to front

When two nodes overlap, the one in the background permanently stays in the background. There is currently no way to bring it on top of the other node. We would like to suggest a new contextual menu item to change a node’s Z-order.

3.Excluding a node from being evaluated

In real world scenarios, it is rare that a graph can be authored with a single attempt. More tweaks are usually required to perfect a workflow. There is currently no way to suppress a node from being included in an evaluation when an upstream node is updated. Each tweak on the graph causes all downstream nodes to be reevaluated, and sometimes that can be quite costly (or resulting in warnings).

We are suggesting a new option (in the node contextual menu) to exclude a node from being included in an evaluation, so its sub-graph does not update when changes happen to any upstream node (either directly or indirectly connected to the said node). The following is the option found in Grasshopper:

4.Creation of nested groups

In a large graph, we hope there is a way to create nested groups. As of today, nodes can only be grouped once, and there is no way to group multiple groups into a larger group.

5.Restoring element colors after Element.OverrideColorInView?

We realized that after an element is colored in Revit through Element.OverrideColorInView node, its color cannot be restored/removed. Trying to restore the color through View Template or View Filter does not work either, which goes to show that the node goes through other means of changing the element colors. Is there a way to restore element color after using Element.OverrideColorInView node?

6.Multi-dimensional lists operations are more tricky (as compared to Grasshopper)

(1)Nested list levels are not clearly denoted The following comparison outlines the differences between Dynamo and Grasshopper, when the same set of data is used:

(2). Lack of nodes that deal with nested lists, there’s only Flatten and NormalizeDepth that allow operations targeting nested list on a specific level. There are times where chaining multiple List.Map is required if we were to target a nested level of a multi-dimensional list. Grasshopper comes with a series of tree-specific helper nodes, as illustrated below. We hope Dynamo can introduce similar set of nodes to make life easier when dealing with multidimensional lists.

You can copy nodes between dyn files, highlight the nodes you want and press Ctrl + C then close the dyn file and open the one you want to copy them to and do a Ctrl + V.

Do agree with opening two dyn files but it might be because if you have one set to automatic and they are linked via revit that you could automatically run the other script when you didn’t want it to though

If an error was programmed 0.9.0 and run automatically was set. There doesn’t appear to be a way to lock the code before reopening without run automatic. There are a few workarounds I have used, but it would be nice if it had a warning before it opened a script with run automatic enabled.

I would like to add one thing the list of additions. Could there be a Re-run option. Once Dynamo has run a node it keeps the data rather than re-computing it to save time and energy. This is awesome but when something changes in Revit you need to disconnect the node run the script and then reconnect it and run it again or close the scrip and reopen. It would be nice to have a Re-run button in addition to Run in case you want to run everything from the start.

Organon,

I understand that Dynamo is not grasshopper but it does not mean somethings should not work the same. When I first started learning Grasshopper I avoided lists like the plague. Once I learned how to uses them everything became much eraser and my node count in my scripts was reduced by 75%. Now that I am using Dynamo I use extra care to keep my list only to find out that the node I need to use does not take arrays. I think a lot of this has to do with using Revit programming since Revit can only execute one thing at a time.

I have not used 9.1 yet but I heard that there is a disable node. If there is not there should be one for all the resins listed above in the first post.